Health Experts Challenge the Safety of Pesticides in Argentina and Brazil

MOTTA, RENATA; ARANCIBIA, FLORENCIA

Medicine, Risk, Discourse and Power (Routledge Advances in Sociology)

Routledge

Lugar: New York; Año: 2015; p. 179 - 206

Pesticides provide a good entry point to discuss the role of science and medicine in the construction of a regulatory order that legitimizes the dominant model of agrarian development as well as in challenging it and constructing alternatives. This chapter addresses the problem of how the high and non-assessed negative health and environmental impacts of agrarian practices with intensive use of pesticides are ignored by science-based regulatory frameworks and constitutes issues of undone science (Frickel et al. 2010, Hess 2009, 2010). Through a comparative case study we analyze the role of health professionals in challenging regulatory science (Jasanoff 1990) and producing knowledge that support claims from local populations in their struggles against the unrestricted use of pesticides in Argentina and Brazil, two important global agrarian players. Our findings show that even if producing undone science is a critical first step in challenging the regulatory science´s discourse that agrochemicals are safe, making these findings official and changing current regulatory frameworks requires further efforts.